William Faulkner and Alcoholism : Distilling Facts and Fictions
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University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2015 William Faulkner and alcoholism : distilling facts and fictions. Quintin Thomas Chipley 1956- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Chipley, Quintin Thomas 1956-, "William Faulkner and alcoholism : distilling facts and fictions." (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2106. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2106 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. 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WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ALCOHOLISM: DISTILLING FACTS AND FICTIONS By Quintin Thomas Chipley B.A., William Marsh Rice University, 1978 M.Div., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1984 M.A., University of Louisville, 1992 M.D., University of Louisville, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Humanities Department of Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2015 Copyright 2015 by Quintin Thomas Chipley All rights reserved WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ALCOHOLISM: DISTILLING FACTS AND FICTIONS By Quintin Thomas Chipley B.A., William Marsh Rice University, 1978 M.Div., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1984 M.A., University of Louisville, 1992 M.D., University of Louisville, 2000 A Dissertation Approved on April 15, 2015 by the following Dissertation Committee: __________________________________ Annette Allen, Ph.D. __________________________________ Paul Griner, M.A. _________________________________ Paul Salmon, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Christopher Stewart, M.D. ii To David Minter, Robert L. Patten and, in memoriam, Charles Garside, Jr.: Three giants from my “One Matchless Time.” iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For support and love, through this project and during long years before, I first acknowledge Leo Schwendau, my life partner. He knows me better than I often wish to be known, and he is more patient with me than I am with myself. If you ever choose to read these meanderings, Leo, please know how much I love you. For the inspiration to pursue the doctoral program, and for specific guidance in this project, I credit Professor Annette Allen. Our first conversation about Absalom, Absalom! confirmed my decision to enroll. For her love of the Modernists which has remained unswayed and convincing, for her seminar on “Creativity and Madness” which spawned the central notions of this project, and for her encouragement to pursue the topic when I had become myopic in my immersion, I am grateful. Each of the other committee members, too, has contributed both valued time and content to this project. Professor Paul Griner taught me, a bad poet, the principles of good fiction in a stellar course in creative writing. The trope, “a character faces a problem, undertakes action to address it, and arrives at a win, lose, or draw,” is his entirely; as well as the notion, “the easiest act a writer can accomplish is to confuse the reader.” Professor Christopher Stewart as Director of the Additction Psychiatry Fellowship at the University of Louisville School of Medicine lends the clinical expertise to the supervision. He extends here the mentoring he has provided since my brief foray in the psychiatry residency where we has an upper level resident in the years before I decided I enjoyed iv more the practice of psychology. Professor Paul Salmon serves as the external reader for this project, extending an interest he first showed in me when I was a graduate student in clinical psychology. His reading assignment from 1987 included the essay by B.F. Skinner that posits the alienation of workers from the products of their labor, a point in this project. For the foundation that has allowed me so many opportunities, I am forever grateful to the faculty of Rice University. I admit nostalgia, but I fiercely defend this retrospection. In those years, 1974-1978, every course in which I was enrolled was taught not just by tenure-track faculty members, but by fully tenured faculty members. Outside the classroom, these women and men sat at table with me in one of the richest experiences of the Academy, a place as pleasant as Plato’s grove. Professor David Minter appeared in my life first not as a Faulknerian, but as the Master of Baker College, our residential community at Rice. He stays in my thoughts in his retirement. Professor Robert L. Patten was as much an energetic Baker College Associate as he was the eminent Victorian literature scholar; a professor who was kind enough to tell me that the Baker College Cabinet minutes I wrote weekly embodied both good and lively prose, and that my term paper in his Dickens class was abysmally bad beyond salvation. In authentic education there is no substitute for such truth in guidance. He remains constantly in my heart, and I am humbled to call him a friend. Finally, I honor Professor Charles Garside, Jr., bene decessit, scholar of Reformation and Renassiance studies. Every lecture for every class was prepared with twelve hours of his life. There is not a day that passes when I do not remember him fondly. He ever remains my mentor magnum cum amore even in his absence. v ABSTRACT WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ALCOHOLISM: DISTILLING FACTS AND FICTIONS Quintin Thomas Chipley April 15, 2015 Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962), evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about the shifted opinion. Evolutionary psychology establishes origins of alcoholism, and medical science of heredity, genetics, and neurophysiology describes the problem. Theoreticians such as Wayne Booth, Harold Bloom, Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek provide tools to explain why we vary in our narratives about our favored writers, their personal problems, and the quality of their works. Narrative and rhetorical choices such as telling vs. showing, framing, and word-choice determine focus in biographies. Likewise, Faulkner’s use of doubled-characters both conceals and reveals his own alcoholism in his fictions. The project argues for practice of simultaneity in the application of multiple perspectives. Links connect survival advantages, intoxication, divergent thinking, and vi heightened creativity, as well as chronic alcoholism, anhedonia, and impaired creativity. The project explains why Faulkner, early in his career, received a creative spark from drinking, was able to sustain this creative flame for a few years even as other bad consequences emerged, and then found his creativity extinguished in alcohol. His rise to fame, however, began exactly at the time that his creativity was waning; a fact that is not so much ironic as it is determined by a drive for others to cling to a creative leader beyond the height of his or her powers. Readers are ardently prone to persist in their attachments to favored writers who no longer function well, paralleling alcoholics who are ardently prone to drink after alcohol no longer benefits them. Both tendencies are coded in our genes. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………….iii ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………....v INTRODUCTION Why Bother with “Brother Bill”?..………………………………………………..……1 Chapter One Taking a Drink, Taken by Drink, and Taking the Cure……………………………….25 Chapter Two Drink in the Ink of Writers: Credential, Crutch, or Crisis?............................................89 Chapter Three Fermenting the Mash: Strong Opinions on Strong Minds, Strong Drink and Strong Imagination…………..142 Chapter Four Of Double Vision and a Double Life: Alcohol and Character-Doubling in Faulkner’s Fiction……………………………...198 Chapter Five ‘The Lion in the Garden,’ the Elephant in the Room, and ‘In Time, That Made a Monkey of Us All”………………………………………255 Epilogue ………………………………………………………………………..…….296 REFERENCES..……………………………………………………………………..302 APPENDIX Blotner Distilled……………………………………………………………………...314 CURRICULUM VITAE……………………………………………………….…….423 viii INTRODUCTION WHY BOTHER WITH “BROTHER BILL”? William Faulkner (dubbed “Brother Bill” by most of his family) once quipped, “Civilization began with distillation,” an aphorism that leans on the poetic consonance and humor of the words more than on anthropological facts. This project in great measure reverses the order of the rhyme, not so much to assert the obvious and prosaic truth that distillation actually began with civilization, but to emphasize that fermentation preceded both. As it